So this is a LONG over due post! Anyway, a bunch of us from class got to attend the 15th International Film Festival of Kerala held in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala in December. Although the festival was from the 10th of December till the 17th, we got permission to attend it only till the 14th 
..this would say :
Geetanjali Chitnis is back from her blogging hiatus.
Let me say that a) the hiatus was totally unplanned for and b) I have no idea why I’m blabbing about the hiatus but then c) I’ve always wanted to make one of these hello-I-am-back-from-my-hiatus-did-you-miss-me-oh-say-you-did-please kind of posts.
ANYWAY. Lately, I’ve been feeling kind of..old. It might have something to do with the fact that I was a “working” woman for a month, since I interned at one of the city’s newspapers. I wrote for the tabloid, got about 16 by lines, and I’m happy. Like someone put it, it was soul training in a sense. The point is, I’m suddenly realizing heck, I’m not going to be able to say I’m somethingteen for much longer (never mind the fact that my birthday is in March). The tween-teen-twen jump is not looking good.
I went off on a four day vacation with my friends from school, where I got to act totally ditzy and blonde and serious all at the same time, and well, I don’t seem to be like that in real life any more. The time away from parents, boyfriend (there was no mobile network coverage), and life in general was great and I meant it when I messaged my dad to say I really didn’t want to come home! But as I sat there listening to all the girly conversations, it hit me (and the rest, I think) that in a year, none of us had really changed all that much. Apart from a one major break up, all of us were still US. And I don’t know whether thats a good thing or bad.
I devoured Megan McCafferty’s Sloppy Firsts – it made me miss high school. Boys, bitchy friends and bathroom drama.
It’s only been a couple of months since school officially “finished”, and already it seems staying in touch is the hardest thing. Obviously, I was one of those people who believed that she would be in constant communication with ok, if not all her friends, then maybe at least the ones who it was possible to stay in touch with. I’m not even saying the ones that “deserve” to be in touch with because to me it seems thats claiming a part of their lives that was easy to give to me when we were able to see each other everyday.
It’s not like I’ve forgotten our little rituals that took place almost without me consciously noticing they had become rituals: walks to the blue fence, “water” breaks that ended up being chatting sessions while we leaned against the lockers, the corner in the class near the shelves that always brought out the deepest darkest secrets. Who can forget the the angled corner of the granite that lay below the (nowgoneistillcantbelieveitomg) cherry tree. And the spot against the other blue fence, opposite our favorite cluster of the trees-with-the-green-almond-bomb fruit.
But somehow I feel the time for long and sad goodbyes has come and gone, and simply dragging it out makes it only more painful. Sometimes I wake up in the mornings wishing that I was going to school (well just for all the reasons except the learning bit), but most mornings I wake up with a feeling of “getting on” with life. I’ve made my share of mistakes in this whole “getting out of school while still remaining the tightest of friends” tango. It’s a strange phase in our lives, and what makes it all the more difficult is the fact that it affects us, the old us, the us that was always comfortable with talking of other people’s relationships and other people’s distancing. But now it feels like I have to make a choice (and this will like everything else I say sound highly exaggerated) between doing new things, and wishing I was still there in the midst of that grey-white-granite-ness, casually strolling from my locker to class with a friend beside me laughing over some comment that sounded perfectly right in my head, but so glaringly wrong when I said it out loud!
I don’t think there’s a resolution to this feeling. Maybe one day staying in touch wont matter to me so much, I can’t say. But for now, while I know it does, I just want to be able to say that hey, I miss you too and no, I haven’t forgotten what it felt like to be a part of us.